Cards
by Meimicchi
Summary: When you drown yourself in the lies of the world, I'll be the one protecting you in the shadows. [Kozue POV]


Cards  
a Shoujo Kakumei Utena fanfic  
by Meimi  
meimi@strawberrymoon.net  
---------  
  
  
Sometimes I lie awake at night. The moonlight slips in through the window, and the stained glass of the bird window on your headboard catches the light. It glows down on your face, making you look so pretty as you lie asleep.  
  
They used to think that the light shining through stained glass in churches was holy light. It makes you glow and shine and look so clean and good in the darkness. Beautiful and blessed and angelic.  
  
The clock will go tick, tick, tick in the darkness until it drives into my brain and drowns out every thought in my mind but you, and I'll throw my legs over the side of the bed and *stare* at you, holy you, beautiful you, *perfect* you. Me in my shadowed corner. Lurking in the darkness, maybe. Most nights, I just sit perfectly still in my shadows and watch you.  
  
I know you know. When you awaken, you can feel that I was staring at you all night. Like my eyes left little dirty streaks all across your white face and soft lips and delicate eyelashes shut in the gentlest of sleeps. You know. And when you slip beneath your sheets each evening and let the holy light shine down on your beauty, you *know*. You know how I'm watching.  
  
I'm always watching. Even when my back is turned or my eyes shut tight, I still see you. We're like that. You know, and because you know, it frightens you.  
  
You're not scared of me. You couldn't be scared of me if you tried, because even if we're so different we're somehow just the same. The normal creatures of the night, gazing on from their black posts, would all stay rooted at the spot with a glance of you. Too good for them, as all of them would simply vanish if your light ever touched them. But I'm not afraid to stand and cross the five soundless steps from my bed to yours. I'm not afraid to sink down to my knees on the carpet and let my fingers trace the path across your skin that my eyes travel every night. I'm dirty, so dirty that I couldn't get clean again if I spent my whole life scrubbing away. And even my filth doesn't make you shy away, because you're so naive, Miki. So innocent. And what frightens you is not the dirt and grime- because somehow my black and your white don't shy away from one another. And really, deep down, you know why.  
  
You still believe in that little piece of you inside me. That you only have to reach within me, and like the broken shards of a car mirror you find on the side of a road, it just needs a little polishing. Wipe away the grime and it'll shine again. Just like it used to.  
  
You've almost given up on it, though you never will completely. You've spent all our lives searching, ever since the moment I started collecting dust. That first moment where I said, "No, I won't play for you," and didn't shine in your eyes anymore; all this time you've thought I hid my tiny piece of brightness away from you for spite.  
  
It's not for spite. It's not even really my fault. It's only my fault that I don't lie about anything, and I never will. I won't lie to you and let you think I'm clean underneath, because if I don't spend each and every day tracking through your world leaving behind my dirt, you'll stop half-believing how dark and black I am inside underneath all the blue. And you'll think, like you did when we were young, that you can save me from my filthy existence if you try.  
  
When you used to look at me so sweetly, and stare at me with those eyes as wide as the ocean and twice as deep, and say, "Please, Kozue, please?" I would almost want to lie to you again.  
  
But I'm stubborn, so very stubborn, and that night when I ran away from the concert, I sat on the piano bench in the garden you loved so much, and stared at the keys colored bluish-black in the summer twilight. I never turned my head to Father's calls that echoed through the night.  
  
And I realized I hated our garden, and I hated you for looking so perfect because you drowned yourself in fake beauty, and most of all I hated myself for spinning my web of lies. And from that day, I've not let another lie escape from my lips, and I won't try to pretend I shine for you, because there never was any light within me in the first place.  
  
"You can't be happy living this way, Kozue."  
  
You said it so helplessly, looking so perfectly lovely in your sorrow. But it's you who's unhappy. Oh, not just you, but everyone in this world where people flee from the truth because it's black. They lie to other people, and lie to themselves, and build up all the lies on high and look so strong. But their lives always end up falling down in pieces like a house of cards; each person just staring at all the broken shards of their false happiness and wondering where they went wrong. They have this lovely family and a pretty house with the payments almost done with and the people who say I Love You until the day they don't, because they never did at all.  
  
But if you hate yourself, then one day, none of the pretty lies make any sense. If you hate yourself, you hate your lies you've made yourself with, and you hate all the things you lied to yourself about. Which is everything.  
  
Just slip that card from beneath the stack and the whole world will come crashing. And it does. It always does, and it never matters because everyone just takes medication and talks to their shrink twice a week and once they think they have enough to make themselves happy, they build the lies up all over again.  
  
Even a dirty, dirty thing can like lolling in the mud.  
  
I could make your darling little card house collapse in an instant, Miki. The lies would fall like rain, and you'd know how right I am.  
  
But if you could accept me like that so simply, you'd have to be broken and shattered. And I've spent all my life making certain ever so carefully that it'll never happen. You'll never even crack.  
  
You see, it's for *that* reason that I frighten you. You see how I color myself as dark as I can, but still believe with every bit of light inside you that I hold that piece inside me that sparkles. You spend all your time looking for a flash of it, that little piece of yourself you lost. Oh, that itself isn't what scares you about us- that missing piece is what you've chosen to revolve your life around.  
  
What scares you is the thought that inside *you* - hiding in the very core of your whiteness, in the innermost depths of your house of cards, at the very center of you - there's a piece of me.  
  
A piece of me so dark and icy cold, eating away at all your holy light with my wildness.  
  
It exists, you see. That's why I'm drawn to you and you to me, because at our centers we have pieces of each other. Blue and white and black, blue and black and white...  
  
It would gnaw at you and scare you even more, but you lie it away like everything else until you almost forget about it. And I'll let you. I'll devote my world to letting you think yourself pure through and through. It's better that way. If you let yourself think that when we split in half, you got all the good and I got all the bad, you can build your lies up so much more beautifully.  
  
I'm beside you. I'm always watching you even when we're miles apart. If you called my name, I would hear and be there in an instant, because I never left.  
  
Don't you see, Miki? You can't be happy with anyone else but me. I'll never let you, because if you so much at glance at another girl to let inside your heart, she'd never understand you at all. She'll lie to herself, and lie to you, and you'll do the same. Just like everyone else in this sorry, delicate world. She'll never understand you like I do. She won't take the blows for you, Miki. She won't take the trouble to drown herself in mud that belongs to you.  
  
If everyone else around you is dirty, you've no choice but to get dirty as well. I told you that.  
  
But you'll never see how the filth I carry is all my share and all of yours.  
  
Himemiya wouldn't take your burden, Miki. No person in this entire world can do it except for me, because I'm the only one who can love you enough to see what you're really like. If you try to break away; if you try to find someone else- you'd break. Because you can't live in a pretty make-believe world forever, and whatever other girl you might choose would be your downfall...she wouldn't protect the world you've built up, while I'm the one who steadies that flimsy little paper structure from every breeze.  
  
You're so dazzlingly, beautifully selfish, you know. Or you don't. Everyone thinks that you're the most selfless person they know. After all, you use your brilliance to tutor Himemiya without wanting a thing in return (except when you do), and when you do fight it's never for yourself (except that it always is), and you put up with that horrible little sister of yours (except she's really keeping you clean and pretty and cute so that everyone loves you, but also keeping you selfish but in a way that you never have to know you are at all).  
  
I love every piece of you. Every selfish little bit of you, every pristine bit, every part of you enclosed within your halo of holy light. And I keep you lying so your house of cards will never fall down, and you can always think of yourself as *perfect*.  
  
I'm not perfect like you. I can't be a naive little fool, though at times I think it would be easier. But I always tell the truth, even to myself, even when it hurts. I can see people for what they are, and I can stop you before you get into trouble and get *hurt*.  
  
Maybe I'm manipulative. Maybe it's not the right thing. Maybe I'm just stacking those towers of cards around the two of us, trying to build a world with just you and me, where everything could be beautiful because there wouldn't be anyone to hurt you, and nobody I had to protect you from. Maybe if I'm not careful someday, it will come tumbling down to crumble into dust...  
  
But I'm careful. Ever so careful. It isn't that such a thing can't happen, but I'll make sure that it won't.  
  
So you lie there in your little pool of glistening holy moonlight, and be a perfect fool. Think what you like about me - I'll let you. Blame me for anything that goes wrong so you won't take notice of all the troubles of the world I keep your head turned from.  
  
But though I'm sure you'll never understand my reasoning or motives, on a day your world trembles...  
  
Perhaps it shall be my arms you fall into, and I will wrap my arms around you and kiss your forehead so gently; as you do when you think I am asleep, and I do when I know you are asleep.   
  
You don't need to understand me, Miki. I understand us enough for the two of us. I'll wait for you forever, and I'll keep you safe until then.  
  
The clock down the hall chimes half past one, and I give you one last look before slipping beneath my sheets again. All I can remember is the softness of your lips pressed against my cheek as I kept still with my eyes shut. I myself thought I was half-asleep, but the memory is engraved within me so strongly without the sense of muddled drowsiness.  
  
I turn over and draw the sheets up around my shoulders. Turning over the memory in my mind, I drift off into the silence of sleep...  
  
But I dream only of you.  
  
  
  
-------  
  
  
4/15/02  
Rather strangely, after ages of watching Utena and never being able to have a certain preference for any one character, I abruptly fell in love with Kozue. She fascinates me.  
My view of Kozue and her relationship with Miki seems to differ from that of other peoples', and view was really all I wanted to communicate in this.  
Comments appreciated.  
-meimi  
meimi@strawberrymoon.net 


End file.
